Best Android apps of the week

Plague – which its makers claim is the number one mobile strategy game – has arrived on Android, and makes for a grim and gripping way to pass the morning commute. The idea is that you have to wipe out the human race with your pathogen, evolving it to evade humanity’s development of a cure. While the game is free, you’ll have to splurge on in-app purchases for the “full experience”.

Plague

As the name suggests, this is a backup app, but the idea is that it backs up all your phone’s data rather than just, say, the music, or your contacts. Instead you can send these, plus call logs, SMS, bookmarks, settings, pictures and videos to one place in the cloud, retrieving them should disaster strike. The first 1GB of storage is free, and after that it’s 99c for 10GB per month.

G Cloud Backup

Polkast connects your Android phone directly to your home computer’s iTunes account, allowing you to stream your songs, albums and playlists over Wi-Fi or a data connection. You can also listen offline using the dynamic “smart caching” mode, which temporarily stores music on your phone.

Hikers should consider MyTrails, which helps you plan and execute your outdoor excursions using online and offline maps, topographical data, spoken and visual directions and more. You can also store your routes using GPS data should you want to repeat them in future (or just reminisce…).

Polkast Music

Google-owned restaurant ratings service Zagat has been given a fresh, fully rebuilt app – and unlike the stuffy old ones, it’s free. Featuring over 30,000 eateries from all over the world (although there’s certainly a US bent to the whole thing, with London the only UK city featured), the app lets you filter by food type, price, facilities and Zagat score, with scores now determined by user ratings. You can even book a table directly through the app.